


someone else

by protectoroffaeries



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Cross-Posted on Tumblr, F/M, Ficlet, multiple people had very emotional reactions to this that i did not anticipate, so here it is much easier to find on ao3
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-25
Updated: 2018-04-25
Packaged: 2019-04-27 14:32:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 602
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14427513
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/protectoroffaeries/pseuds/protectoroffaeries
Summary: “I do not want to die who I am. I would like to live long enough to be someone else.” -Percy de Rolo III, Episode 64





	someone else

**Author's Note:**

> this is also on tumblr (@nottmygoblindaughter)

The day his first child is born, Percy puts his guns away.

He locks all three of them in a chest and hides it in the back of his workshop. His worst nightmares have a dark-haired toddler with Retort in hand and the ear-splitting crack of a fatal gunshot. He should destroy them, he knows he should, but he can’t. Ripley released others into the world, and now he has to keep them.

Damn that bitch, he thinks, and a chill runs down his spine. It’s been years since they killed her, and still Ripley haunts him. She always will. She won’t win, though. The only winners in this game are Vox Machina, and even then, it’s bittersweet.

But there’s something powerful about being able to put the guns away at all.

~

He and Vex have five children total, two sons and three daughters. They’re all hellions, of course, but they laugh freely and sleep peacefully, unburdened by combat, cruelty, death. Unburdened by pretty much everything, to be perfectly honest. There are a thousand cautionary tales regarding spoiled children, but Percy doesn’t spend a moment feeling bad for giving his kids everything he had taken from him, everything Vex grew up without.

Percy teaches them to tinker, to build little toys (not weapons, never weapons), and his oldest daughter takes to it more than the rest. He tells Vex that she inherited his only good quality, and Vex tells him that he’s an idiot. The youngest, Percival de Rolo IV (called affectionately by myriad of nicknames by his older siblings, including, but not limited to: d4, Junior, Tattletale, ‘Cival), also has a knack for creation, but of a different sort: he bakes. He wants to be a baker. It’s absurd in the most amazing way.

The twins are like every other set of twins in the family: Percy sees Vex and Vax in them, but also Oliver and Whitney. They’re scrapy troublemakers, joined at the hip, and they conform and bend to absolutely no one, not even each other. (It’s not until later, much later, that Percy realizes the twins are more like him than anyone else; one of them gets her hands on Bad News, eventually, and the other is almost General de Rolo.)

The oldest is called by adventure.

~

It takes nearly twenty years, but eventually it occurs to Percy that he is, first and foremost, a father. When he tells Vex, she looks at him blankly -  _you’ve been a father for a long time, darling_ \- and he shakes his head and repeats himself,  _no, I’m a_  father, _not an orphan, not cursed, not a bitter shell of a man who wants revenge, I’m a father and a husband, and I build clocks-_

Vex laughs.

It’s obvious, in retrospect. He put away the guns. He learned to bake chocolate chip cookies and to braid hair and to have important Talks and to enforce groundings and to draw laughter from bruises that came from climbing the Sun Tree too high. He’s not the man he once was. He’s not the monster Orthax or the Briarwoods or Ripley should have made him.  

He tells Vex locking away the guns was the turning point. She rolls her eyes because she’s always known better. T _here wasn’t one turning point, darling._

She recites back to him his new List, every act of fatherhood that made him better, but then she goes back further, to the day they were married, to Vox Machina days. She’s acting like she can’t believe she has to tell him this  _after all this time,_  but she’s smiling.

~

_"Congrats, Freddy."_


End file.
